Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

I wrote out this long post about this, but it didn't go up for some reason, and I don't want to type it all out again, so I'm just throwing the question out.

--------------------The ultimate meaning of our being can only be fulfilled in the paradoxical leap beyond the tragic-demonic frustration. It is a leap from our side, but it is the self-surrendering presence of the Ground of Being from the other side.
- Paul Tillich

the reason for the question was a scene in the movie waking life where a professor contrasts sartre with 'the' postmodernists. the professor finds the postmodernists too relative (relative because of their deterministic tendancies, i.e. quantifying people into products of environment, etc) while existentialists provide a justification for free will - since we don't have a pre existing ideal to conform to we can choose with moral certainty.

so this guy says existentialism (sartre) leads to absolute morality. not relative.

--------------------The ultimate meaning of our being can only be fulfilled in the paradoxical leap beyond the tragic-demonic frustration. It is a leap from our side, but it is the self-surrendering presence of the Ground of Being from the other side.
- Paul Tillich

Sartre was a marxist and a poleznye idioty (Lenin's words for "useful idiot"). Or maybe even worse.

If Jean-Paul Sartre doesn't trigger your vomit reflex, chances are that Joseph Goebbels or Alfred Rosenberg don't either, and that is too scary for words.

This is how Sartre explained his ideological support for mass murder:

Quote:As we were neither members of the party nor avowed sympathisers it was not our duty to write about Soviet labour camps; we were free to remain aloof from the quarrel over the nature of this system, provided no events of sociological significance had occurred.

The truth is that he knew about the communist death camps, but he still kept on licking Stalin's ass until it became unfashionable to do so, and at that point he suddenly became a critic of Stalin (but strangely enough not of marxism itself).

Sartre had one bad trip on mescaline in 1935 that made him psychotic, but I hesitate to draw the conclusion that it could be enough to explain his persistent idiocy in the decades that followed.

PS. Sartre became a critic of Stalin only after Stalin's death. The alpha-male died, long live the new alpha-male. That is Sartre in a nutshell.

Quote:The truth is that he knew about the communist death camps, but he still kept on licking Stalin's ass until it became unfashionable to do so, and at that point he suddenly became a critic of Stalin (but strangely enough not of marxism itself).

Stalin does not equal Marxism. In fact, Stalin corrupted the Marxist ideals greatly.

well, I really don't see your point. If every philosopher has to pass a modern pc litmus test, then we ought to simply stop talking about philosophy. alot of what people did in the past isn't kosher today, it doesn't make their ideas any less interesting.

the mescal tripping thing is funny, in 'lsd the private sea' sarte is quoted as describing the experience as like "fighting an angry badger" in his head or something like that.

so ignore that the professor fellow is talking sartre, cause this issue is applicable to a general existential doctrine.

atomikfunksoldier -

it's taoism.

--------------------The ultimate meaning of our being can only be fulfilled in the paradoxical leap beyond the tragic-demonic frustration. It is a leap from our side, but it is the self-surrendering presence of the Ground of Being from the other side.
- Paul Tillich

Quote:well, I really don't see your point. If every philosopher has to pass a modern pc litmus test, then we ought to simply stop talking about philosophy. alot of what people did in the past isn't kosher today, it doesn't make their ideas any less interesting.

You're right of course, there is no reason not to talk about the philosophy of Plato or Heidegger, although they are acknowledged as being fascists. I am sorry if it sounded like I wanted to suppress discussion about Sartre, that was not my intention. I just wanted to remind people about what an asshole he was.

My point is only that we should pay more attention to people who did not prove to the world that they were idiots during their lifetime, than to the people who were successful in this regard.

To expand on the "isms are bunk" comment, I think that it's useless to try and classify everybody's values within a single word. I think that most people have traits of many different "isms", and yet they might attempt to attach themselves to one particular label... or be labeled by somebody else.

I'm sure that simply by writing the comments above, somebody reading this will already believe they have my "ism" figured out.

Let's keep in mind as well that we should never jump to label anybody... I find that it's a great annoyance when people do this to me. I've been called a number of "isms" by people who seem to think that they know who I am based on one or two things that I say.

I have nothing against philosophy, let's just stop trying so hard to define ourselves... I could go on but I'll stray way off topic! Sorry, just my 2 cents

--------------------Here we are, in these bodies, on this planet in an endless universe. This is not the extent of who we are... merely an extension of who we really are.

Quote:Let's keep in mind as well that we should never jump to label anybody...

That's very true Amnesiac. But surely there is no harm in reminding people about which philosophers made a point of opposing mass murderers, and who didn't? Labeling people isn't something one does lightly, but in extreme cases (like Sartre) the label is just a necessary warning sign.

well, obviously being a nazi does make one thing twice about giving credence to his philosophy - which is the point rhizoid is making - however, it seems that interesting philosophers, or at least popular philosophers, have a propensity towards histrionic extremes. saints that are recovering alcoholics and the like (or alan watts - this was a big debate).

so either the masses are attracted to these sorts of characteristics in their philosophers, or philosophers in general are deviants.

none of this has anything to do with my original question though - in light of this argument that existential thinking frees one from realtivity and postmodern thinking's relativism is a product of it's determinism? how is existentialism relative? it really looks like a way to make absolute moral stances.

--------------------The ultimate meaning of our being can only be fulfilled in the paradoxical leap beyond the tragic-demonic frustration. It is a leap from our side, but it is the self-surrendering presence of the Ground of Being from the other side.
- Paul Tillich

Taoism? Well, actually the chinese don't use our alphabet, they have their own (they are a different culture you know) so there's no definite way to spell it. However, there is an official system based on converting the words to use consonants that make the word pronounced more correctly. Pinyin it's called, and so Taoism is wrong, it's actually daoism.

dog- - well, since I _am_ chinese, your explaination is superfluous. yes, it sounds like dao, but it's usually spelled tao.

david- - so you agree that existentialism is absolute. but is this really absolute? if it's reached in a relative way?

--------------------The ultimate meaning of our being can only be fulfilled in the paradoxical leap beyond the tragic-demonic frustration. It is a leap from our side, but it is the self-surrendering presence of the Ground of Being from the other side.
- Paul Tillich